The 'Lost' Council of Nerds

Each week, Dan Fierman, Alex Pappademas and Kevin "The Monger" Sintumaung gather to email about their favorite show. Make fun of them, and they’ll detonate an a-bomb on your ass.

Alex: I do not buy Sawyer as a Stooges fan, even in the depths of his post-Juliette world’s-forgotten-boy mourning. George Jones, yes. Skynyrd, absolutely. Maybe even David Allen Coe. But "Search and Destroy"? This is one of those When The Writers Make The Characters Like The Things They Themselves Like, Disregarding Realism type situations.

That said, Dharma whiskey and RAW POWER seems like a kind of awesome way to spend an afternoon.

**Dan: **NO SHIT! That bugged me too. He found the one Stooges disc under a stack of Creedence? Really? But if ABC were smart, they’d come out with a whole line of Dharma branded products. And then Alex Cox could sue them for ripping off Repo Man.

Anyhow, I dug the episode. Positives: The whole "flash forward" conceit actually worked this time. I was, hmm, what is the word? Right. Interested. (Though how this Earth-2 plot ISN’T the happy ending that’s coming at the end of the season is beyond me.) No Kate. No dude with fu manchu beard. No sets that look like they were rejected from Hot Tub Time Machine. A lot of Evil Locke, secret caves, references to the numbers, and Sawyer boozing away. What wasn’t to like?

**Alex: **Not to mention the weirdest funeral Jeff Fahey has ever been to. Which I suspect is saying a lot. I am of the opinion that no amount of Ben Linus is too much, so I loved his eulogy for Locke, and the way he prefaced his explanation when Ilana asked him how her bounty-hunter compadres died: "Okay, but there’s a fairly reasonable chance you won’t believe me."

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Kevin: I liked how there were, for a lack of a better word, "editorial flashbacks" for, I think, the first time in Lost. (Other than clip shows, of course.) You see Fake Locke kick Jacob into the fire when Ben is explaining how Jacob died—in case you forgot. And you see each of Jacob’s encounters with the plane crash crew pre-crash. I really hope there are more of those this season so I don’t have to watch-and-Wiki or consult Jesse Lee every time I have a question. Which is, like, always.

Dan: Anyone have any ideas on what being a "candidate" means? Other than for Kirsten Gillibrand’s senate seat? I figure it has to be the person who can either replace Jacob or somehow tip the free will/destiny struggle between Jacob and the MIB toward the good guys.

Speaking of which, that kid is Jacob, right?

**Kevin: **Yes—I believe that kid is Young Jacob (which would also make a decent rapper name.) He’s got to be, right? But why were his arms all bloody the first time that MIB/Fake Locke saw him? Was he wrestling a polar bear?

**Alex: **Jungle Boy? He looks the part. But who knows?

Yeah—it sounded to me like the "candidates" are potential Jacob successors/protectors of the Island, a job that (if we believe Fake Locke) may actually be a pointless endeavor, the Season 2 pushing-the-button thing writ cosmically large.

And the thing is, I don’t think we’re meant to discount that argument, necessarily. After this week I’m convinced the whole Fake Locke/Smokey=Evil, Jacob=Good dichotomy is a setup. Or at least, that it’s (sorry) not that black-and-white. I mean, c’mon—the Smoke Monster even got a backstory this week. He just wants to be free! He has feelings! He has known love, and betrayal, and loss! (And probably has daddy issues regarding the taxi-receipt printer that sired him, knowing this show.)

Anyway, good episode. Although I’ve basically had enough of scenes like the one where Richard talks to Sawyer and tries to convince him that Fake Locke is up to no good WITHOUT ACTUALLY SAYING WHY. This is what people who hate this show think it’s like all the time: A bloody beat-up guy runs out of the jungle, says a bunch of cryptic things, then runs away again before finishing a sentence that might potentially have contained substantive information. It’s like that chick in Help! who keeps saying "I can say no more" to Paul McCartney, which means this movie will end with Hurley almost being sacrificed by the Thuggees and a dedication to "Elias Howe, who in 1846 invented the sewing machine."

Also: The ceiling! Names and numbers! When Fake Locke took Sawyer into the cave, said "This is why you’re here" and gestured with the torch, how much did you want the reveal to be a giant four-toed statue of Sawyer?

Well, I kinda did.

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Dan: Yeah. There’s now way it’s this simple, but that honestly bums me out a little bit, since it will (certainly, inevitably) undercut what I think is the darkest, and most sneaky-smart thing that Lost has done, which is to take Locke, the Man of Faith, and play him for a dupe. He believes? He fights Jack? He claims to be divinely inspired?

I just loved the darkness of that, and given my own theological leanings, its implications. There’s no way they will let it stand. Absolutely no way. Though I would love to see what would happen to Jeff "Doc" Jensen if they did. I think his head would explode.

**Alex: **The irony would be kinda perfect, though. Locke, possessed by Smokey, becomes the free-will guy, and Jacob turns out to be the puppet-master, using faith to push people around. (It’s the old sky-cake dodge, island-style!)

Me, personally, theologically? I want this to turn out to be a story where free will wins and one all-powerful being doesn’t get to mastermind everybody’s future by chalking names and numbers on a cave-ceiling. If somebody showed me that, I’d follow my dead friend off the island, too.

**Kevin: **You’re right, it’s not so black and white. Initially Jacob seems to be the giver-of-life/good guy (I mean he revives pre-crash Locke after getting thrown out of a building by touching him) and Fake Locke seems to be a smoke-monster killing machine, but then when you find it’s all some sick game they’re playing, you find out both Jacob and Fake Locke are kind of fucked up in their own way. It’s kind of like at the end of Legion when you find out that, guess what, God hates us. (Did I really just reference a WMEOTW?)

Back to that cave. Honestly, for a second, before they went in I though they were going to dive into the ocean to check out the CGI four-toed foot we saw in episode one.

Dan: But didn’t you groan when fake Locke said "Jacob has a thing for numbers."

Great. Thanks. Thanks a lot. WE GOT THAT ALREADY, COULD YOU PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC? Still. The chalked numbers were rad. No doubt about that.

Alex: And and and: Locke is engaged to Peggy Bundy in the Earth-2 timeline, and his dad (the guy who threw him out a window and left him paralyzed, in the old timeline) is on the shortlist for their hypothetical Vegas wedding.

We’ve been operating under the assumption that Earth-2 is just a world where the plane never crashed and everything else is the same, but the vision we got of Locke’s relative domestic bliss makes me think it’s different in ways we haven’t seen yet.

**Kevin: **I totally agree. The appearance of Ben Linus as a school teacher—damn he would have been horrible to have as a teacher—pretty much says that this Earth-2 is a twisted Bizarro world where Ethan is a baby doctor and Hurley drives a Hummer

**Dan: **Exactly. This is why this got more interesting to me. There’s clearly not a simple relationship between the two universes. Yeah, Kate is on the run, but for a different crime. Jack and Locke seem to get along. Hurley is "lucky" and happy. Etc. Etc.

Though I will say that Peggy Bundy’s work is still awful in Earth-2. Man, it is weird to hear the voice of Leela coming out of that face.